Intel's Cloudera Investment Hits $740 Million

Intel invested about $740 million in Cloudera, taking an 18 percent share of the Hadoop-based big data software maker.

Cloudera officials on March 31 said the company has had a $900 million round of financing, including a previously announced $160 million of that coming from several backers, such Google Ventures, T. Rowe Price and an affiliate of MSD Capital, an investment arm of Michael Dell. The investment by Intel Capital—the investment arm of the giant chip maker—gives the vendor the 18 percent share in Cloudera.

The deal could be good for both companies, with Intel leveraging Cloudera's more mature Hadoop distribution and big data expertise, and Cloudera gaining access to Intel's massive technological and sales resources.

"By aligning the Cloudera and Intel roadmaps, we are creating the platform of choice for big data analytics," Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, said in a statement at the time the investment and partnership were announced. "We expect to accelerate industry adoption of the Hadoop data platform and enable companies to mine their data for insights that inform the business."

In announcing the $900 million investment round, Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly said the support shows the leadership position his company has in the booming big data market.

"The market opportunity for companies to gain insight and build transformative applications based on Hadoop is tremendous," Reilly said in a statement. "Clearly, demand is accelerating and the market is poised for growth—for all of the players in this space—and we believe Cloudera will be the company to lead this global shift in extracting value from data."

Cloudera officials pointed to recent numbers issued by analysts at Gartner and IDC as indications of the market potential of big data. IDC analysts have said the market for big data technology and services will hit $32.4 billion by 2017, while those at Gartner said big data will drive $232 billion in IT spending through 2016.

The company will use the money on the collaboration effort with Intel to further push the adoption of Hadoop and promote the enterprise data hub, a reference architecture based on Apache Hadoop that includes other open-source components.

The $900 million in financing is expected to close in the second quarter.